Death Panels–Again?

In a February 28 pieceheadlined, “Obama Ready to Move Forward on Healthcare Reform,” the Washington Post‘s Anne Kornblut closed on a rather odd note:

Republicans have expressed growing confidence heading into the midterm elections, with healthcare as a potential campaign tool. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele took the argument a step further, saying after the Thursday summit that it had been “a death panel for Obama-care.”

“If that wasn’t enough, when you come out of this thing and you’re looking at the reconciliation fight that may loom ahead of us, it certainly will have represented a death panel for the Democrats this fall,” Steele said on CNN.

Death panels became part of the debate last summer, after prominent Republicans, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, claimed the government would set them up to decide who could live or die.

Is theassumptionhere that everyone knows that there were never any death panels in any healthcare bill?When the leader of a major partyis still making references to them,itdeserves some sort of corrective from a journalist. The Post reminds readers where the lie came from–but not that it’s a lie.

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Activism Director and and Co-producer of CounterSpinPeter Hart is the activism director at FAIR. He writes for FAIR's magazine Extra! and is also a co-host and producer of FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin. He is the author of The Oh Really? Factor: Unspinning Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly (Seven Stories Press, 2003). Hart has been interviewed by a number of media outlets, including NBC Nightly News, Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and the Associated Press. He has also appeared on Showtime and in the movie Outfoxed. Follow Peter on Twitter at @peterfhart.

I am a social worker in a VA outpatient medical clinic in Auburn, Ca. There are no death panels! The VA does not encourage disabled veterans to die or deny them life saving treatments to save the VA money! We are grossly underfunded and understaffed to do any justice to America’s veterans. The terminally disgruntled Republican opposition seems to have no low they won’t go in descrediting the Obama healthcare plan. Have we, as a nation, reached that rabid anti-anythingpublic point of no return. Is there any place for the public good in political discourse in America? Caring is dying an agregious death in the 21st. Century in America.

Apparently the Republicans are fine with the current corporate death panels already in place in America’s health insurance companies. They don’t want a government bureaucrat deciding our health care but they have no problem with some greedy executive with an Ivy League MBA deciding who lives and who dies.

It’s sad that the lapdogs at the Washington Post and most other media outlets fight against their own and their children’s own welfare. One would they THEY were all millionaires profiting from the health care status quo. Well, their bosses are, so I guess it’s do as you’re told or find a new job. Personally, I think I’d rather work in a different profession if being a journalist means selling your soul.

Isn’t it time that all people wake up to the fact that this is only cover, a distraction to what is really taking place in the country. Instead of allowing members of both national Parties to camouflage the looting of the future of our Children, Grandchildren, Great Grandchildren and Beyond, so they can partake in the Greed of getting theirs @ the expense of the working people, there needs to be a movement like when Civil Rights, Vietnam protests that swept the country, letting the politicians know in no uncertain terms that we had enough of their B.S. It doesn’t matter which side of the Flag one is standing on, the Right or the Left, we are all Citizens of this Nation. Black, White, Red, Brown, Yellow, any combination of, it’s time people, to stand up for the Freedoms that have been eroded in the name of “The War on Terror”. As long as they are able to distract, divide & conquer, we will only descend into the bottomless pit, while the few dictate for the majority, the status qua can’t continue. I’m not advocating overthrowing them, but, “Revolution” now & then is a good thing, if nothing to remind those who would usurp the majority for the few.

The problem our nation faces now is the acceptance that everyone is entitled to make as much money for themselves, however they can, without regard to the Public Good. The more money some individuals or corporations make, the easier it is for them to make more. The result is the present inequity of income for the rich and everyone else. Even the notion that all people should share in the wealth of the nation, Socialism, has become a bad word. And this same rich and selfish people are supposed to be Christians!

We have death panels, decentralized to be sure. Anyone who decides to rescind your policy after years of accepting premiums justifies that action by referring to some death panel somewhere in the bowels of some glass-fronted pile of bricks in Hartford.